by Harvey
Wasserman & Bob Fitrakiswww.dissidentvoice.org
August 17, 2004First Published in
The Free Press

It's
time for the Kerry, Nader and Green campaigns to get locked in a room until
they disarm the circular firing squad and focus on the real enemy, George W.
Bush.

Especially in swing states
like ours, the endless wrangling and rancor must stop. Every boring,
suicidal attack harms our ability to beat Bush.

In light of his votes for
war in Iraq, the Patriot Act and way too much else, it's obvious President
Kerry will be no messiah. But we doubt our democracy or our planet would
survive four more years of Cheney-Rove-Bush.

So we may ask friends in
safe states like Massachusetts and Hawaii to balance our Kerry votes here in
Ohio with votes there for Ralph or for the Green Party candidate, David
Cobb.

If Al Gore had met and
worked with Nader in 2000 instead of attacking him, we might have been
spared the horrors of these past four years. It's inaccurate, unwise and
self-destructive to continually blame Ralph for the Democrats' "loss" when
in fact Gore won the election. We are glad Kerry has had the good sense to
meet with Ralph, and to refrain from attacking the Greens.

But the three camps need to
make a pro-active peace. Now!

Pat Buchanan clearly cost
Bush some key states in 2000. The Republicans haven't spent the past four
years screaming at him. But they did find a way to keep him from running in
2004.

Ralph has every right to
run for president. Fighting to keep him off the ballot presumes the way to
save democracy is to suppress it. It also presumes those who ultimately
choose to vote for him are some sort of inanimate stolen property,
wrongfully taken from the Democrats if only Ralph hadn't somehow brainwashed
them into voting for him.

Please!!!

You can regret voting for
Nader in 2000. But he was not responsible for the Democrats' miserable
campaign. Among other things, Nader should have been included in the
presidential debates. Instead he was physically ejected from the first
Gore-Bush debate, which Gore proceeded to lose.

The Democrats won the
popular vote by 500,000 votes, but sat on their hands and kept their mouths
wide shut while the Republicans stole the presidency. Gore's catastrophic
mis-handling of the Florida debacle and his silence after it were
catastrophic, and ran directly counter to the kinds of campaigns Nader has
run--- successfully---since 1963.

From the Liberty and Free
Soil Parties through Lincoln's Republicans, the Greenbackers, Populists,
Socialists, Progressives, Dixiecrats, Peace and Freedom Parties, Peronista/Reform
Party, and Buchananites, third parties have been part of American
presidential campaigns more often than not. Those who have accommodated and
co-opted them rather than attacking them have been the ones to win the White
House. Gore's polls ran consistently higher when he adopted the pro-peace,
environmental and social justice stands Nader and the Greens have demanded.
Rather than attacking Nader now, Kerry's Democrats should be adopting Green
positions.

Nader ran in 1996, and in
again in 2000. There is no mystery about what he or the Greens stand for.
There's no excuse for anybody---Nader, the Greens or the Democrats---to
attack each other in 2004.

We need a joint declaration
of strategy from these three campaigns. We don't need Karl Rove smirking at
yet another mass leftist suicide.

Franklin Roosevelt, against
whom the Socialist Norman Thomas ran four times, honored him in the Oval
Office for being the principled gentleman he was. FDR's victories were based
in part on his co-option of key parts of the Socialist platforms, which
Thomas graciously welcomed.

It's a time-honored model.
Kerry, Nader and the Greens could all win if they follow it. It's unlikely
democracy or our planet will survive if they don't.